Crimson (August)

One very irritating pop song is ‘Crimson and Clover’. Over and over this moronic psychedelia, with its repetitious tremolo, repeats in the mind until all you want is to jump from Ken Kesey’s bus. You find yourself ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’. Is this any better? Rarely has there been a more bombastic august overblown full-length account of going somewhere unreal. Along the dial Donald Fagen sings “They call Alabama the Crimson Tide,” as though his life depends on it. It’s all over, red rover, as Steely Dan tracks with clinical eye the end of the crimson trip.

Crimson (January)

Equally pleasant company of a January evening are Phryne Fisher and Jane Marple. Whether in silk or tweed, frightfully clever, casing St. Kilda villas or St. Mary Mead manors, their opinions spry then blunt, lives never dull, minds razor-sharp. Weekend parties and tennis matches, time for tea and oh dear time for crimson. Inevitable really, given their proximity, a trickle in the bath, a gash in the cranium. Frightful, but we who shriek at sight of blood, wince at roadkill under wheels, widen eyes at unpleasantness behind glass. The Sixth Commandment keeps the narrative moving, suspects many, clues distractingly increasing.